Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Senator Richard (Dick) Shelby
Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), the Chair of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, has announced a hearing on March 3 at 10:00 a.m. to examine “Regulatory Reforms to Improve Equity Market Structure.” To appropriately conduct that hearing, all the lights should be turned out in the hearing room and the senators and witnesses should have to fumble and stumble their way to their seats in the dark, since that’s what American investors have been forced to do since the 2008 crash – a tortuously long seven years of make-believe financial reform.
Following the 1929 crash, whose economic impact was also swift and devastating, the Senate Banking Committee spent the years of 1932 through 1934 holding comprehensive hearings and investigations on the structure of the stock market. The hearings unraveled, day by day, the frauds that the Wall Street titans of that era were inflicting on a gullible public. The initiating Senate resolution to undertake the hearings was worded thusly:
“A resolution to thoroughly investigate practices of stock exchanges with respect to the buying and selling and the borrowing and lending of listed securities, the value of such securities and the effects of such practices.”
As each devious fraud was revealed, the details landed on the front pages of newspapers in bold headlines. That provided the strong public momentum for the Banking Act of 1933, known as the Glass-Steagall Act, to separate the fraud-prone Wall Street bankers from the banks taking deposits from savers.
No such scenario played out after the 2008 crash.
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